blatant muse

so you want to learn how to write…

really?

i mean, really?

no problem. trust me.

writing is easy.

it’s knowing when to stop that’s hard.

welcome.

you have discovered a project to teach writing, totally online. i have never tried this before. i have been journaling online for years and publishing books for almost as long but when it comes to combining the two, i am a relative incunabulist. but we shall learn together.

i have taught creative writing and what you see here is going to be a journey from she who does not write into she who does. not me, of course, since i have been writing for public consumption since i was but a wee babe. you.

let’s start with the ground rules. you obviously want to write or you would have given up on this several paragraphs ago. that tells me something. it doesn’t mean that you have something in particular to say (a vast misconception, equating the desire to write with the existence of a story to tell) but it means that you desire a forum in which you reach out to others in a way that only words do. secondly, you don’t know how to get started. if you did, you would already be writing. that’s not to say that this is not going to be helpful for those people who already write but that’s not my specific goal.

in my classroom, i hear two things. first, i don’t know how to get started, is the blatant cry for help. second, my writing sucks, follows quickly on its heals, typically from another student.

we’re going to start with fixing the first. then we’ll move on to the second. seems reasonable, right?